1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to telephone switching equipment and, more particularly, to a monitor for telephone switching equipment used in a telephone switching office.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephone switching offices include many complex, high-speed switching circuits and computers interconnected together to forming a distributed, computer-controlled switching system. Most of the equipment in a switching office is selected to meet the needs of the subscribers, i.e., the customers of the telephone service provider. A central office serving a rural community may only require hardware to provide basic telephone service. A central office for a metropolitan area likely needs equipment to handle high speed digitized voice, data and video services.
Over time however, equipment needs of a central office change. Equipment in a rural switching office might grow obsolete; equipment in an urban switching center might become inadequate. As the equipment in a telephone central office equipment evolves and the tasks performed by such equipment changes, maintenance workers need to monitor equipment usage in the office.
When considering upgrade, expansion, or replacement of switching equipment, a maintenance technician should have the ability to know whether or not a piece of equipment is operating near its capacity, i.e. the technician should be able to determine usage of central office equipment over time. Data for specific equipment needs to be made available to the technician for continued reliability and cost-effective equipment management. Because telephone switching equipment is now essential to public safety agencies, equipment in a central office requires near-continuous monitoring. Yet, because there may be thousands of switching circuits in a large central office switch, continuous monitoring of all of the hardware in a switching system poses significant logistic difficulties.
Programming the switching system computer itself to track equipment usage would require additional software to be written into the already complex system software. Patching such software into existing system software invariably introduces programming bugs which adversely affect switching system reliability. Even if equipment-usage-software could be seamlessly incorporated into switching system software, execution of the code to perform the task would use CPU time of processors that could be used for call processing.
A non-invasive tool that can continuously keep track of equipment service levels, without degrading system performance would provide hard data on equipment usage that could be used to plan for equipment expansion, prevent service outages, and reduce maintenance costs compared with existing methods of tracking switching office equipment use. Continuously and non-invasively monitoring switching equipment usage throughout a switching office would be an improvement over the prior art, which does not presently provide a tool, to continuously perform dedicated real-time, data collection of switching equipment usage without taxing computational resources of a switching system controller. Such a dedicated tool would be a benefit to a technician, to the telephone service provider, and its customers and would be an improvement over the prior art.
Consequently, there exists a need for a telephone office equipment monitor for monitoring equipment utilization in a typical telephone central office. Additionally, there is a need to monitor the central office equipment in a non-invasive manner.